Munich Air & Style
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photo:james bryant

Sitting on a train cruising in the darkness on a friday night, the realisation hit me; I could not speak a word of German. Only two things reassured me that I was indeed heading into Munich. The first thing was the tidiness of the train (in Munich everything is clean and tidy). The second thing was the guy sporting an impressive mustache and mullet combo sat opposite me, who his friends called "Klaus". I must be in Munich, I thought. It's a total cliche, but as my weekend would prove to me, all the cliches you can think of about Germans are 100% true. They love rocking, they love beer, and they love hot dogs, mind you, don't we all...oh yeah, they love snowboarding too.

When I started snowboarding back in 1996 there was one contest that I knew about, the Air & Style contest in Austria. It was whilst watching footage of it on "Odd Man Out" to the sound of Silverchair that me and my mates decided we had to start snowboarding. Ten years on I am still snowboarding, and ten years on, the Air & Style contest is still inspiring me every time I see footage of it. There is something about the Air & Style that sets it above all the other snowboard contests in the world. From it's roots in Innsbruck, the Air & Style has moved to Seefeld, and now onto Munich. To the Olympic stadium, no less...

Munich struck me as a friendly city straight from the outset, but a city with a definite buzz. Whether it is something in the air, or the thousands of litres of Gluhvein that get consumed there every day, I don't know, but there was a great vibe that weekend, and strolling up the hill to the Olympic Park and hearing the unmistakable sound of snowboard commentary, the buzz just kept getting better. Never have you seen a snowboard event of such grand proportions. The run in to the jump was a feit of engineering in itself, a complexed construction of scaffolding morphed into the stadiums already sleek design. A huge crane then stood grandly, hanging from it hundreds of spotlights, that each time a rider flew off the 20 metre kicker below, lit the whole venue in flashes of 720's and 1080's. The so called "rookie" contest was a new addition to the event for this year, but don't let the name decieve; these riders were on the top of their game. Burton's young ripper Mikkel Bang took first place which means next year he'll be in the main pro contest, and given another year of riding, this dude will not look out of place alongside the likes of Shaun White. The format of the proceedings was very fast paced, so as soon as the rookies finished riding, you only had to cast your eyes across to the stage to see Milburn warming up. There's been a lot of hype about this Sheffield based group, to the extent of hearing them labelled "the new Arctic Monkies". The boys put on a great indy performance but you got the feeling that rockers Billy Talent, who played later, were more suited to the German's taste and they definitely had heads banging. No sooner had the whaah of guitars faded out, and the roar of motorbikes echoed around the stadium...the yanks were here and put on quite a display. The motocross was great to watch. While snowboarding has evolved so far, these days I find it hard to be shocked even by the finest display of technical tricks. With motocross though, I am still blown away by even the simple tricks. The sheer amount of air those guys catch is insane. When you see the way they handle those bikes you understand why they've all got super hot girlfriends.

Before we knew it the snowboard final was getting underway. One after the other the pros raised the ante, with double rodeos and massive rotations. Each time when they got to the bottom to unstrap their board, they had a personal chauffer awaiting them in the form of a motocross bike and rider to whisp them back to the top of the stadium. Like I said, everything was fast paced and the organisers spared no expense. Travis Rice stacked his first couple of jumps and you thought one of the spinning Finns might steal the show with their 1260's, but on his last jump Travis stuck a double backflip late 180, and rode away clean. The prize was his. Hoards of photographers and flashes were immediately surrounding him and I had to stop to check Britney Spears hadn't turned up or something. No, no, this was just the way of the Air & Style, glitz and glamour, this was snowboardings elite and you knew it.


Air & Style in photos